Designing an Academic Poster

In my department, we are in conference presenting season. The number of poorly designed scientific posters I've seen over the years hurts my delicate sensibilities as a designer-turned-researcher. I've found myself on the receiving end of a lot of questions on poster design, so here are my quick tips that I always give to other academics. If you read nothing else, design your poster with humanity in mind.

An example of my poster template:

Notice the focus on images, color blocking, and takeaway messages in big, colorful text

 1. Start on a sheet of paper and keep it brief.

These two simple pieces of advice go hand in hand because no one wants to stand for 20 minutes reading your poster in a sea of hundreds of other posters, and drawing a basic outline on paper can keep you from agonizing over every pixel (spending hours in one small part of your poster and getting nowhere fast).

START WITH A PIECE OF PAPER AND WRITE THE FOLLOWING: 

1. A 1-2 sentence of the "big idea" that you want any audience member to grasp from 30 seconds with you and your poster. Example: "the literature suggests X but our study found the opposite."

2. Sections of the poster required by the conference (abstract, intro, etc.) if any

3. All of the drawings, figures, graphs, and/or tables that you want to put on the poster to communicate the "big idea." Try to think about what you, as a poster audience member, might want to see on a poster and prioritize those figures.

4. Draw a haphazard rectangle and generally block out where you want each section to live on your poster and where each of your beloved figures will live. I emphasize generally because academics are notorious for getting lost in the weeds. Here I'm talking about a series of basic circles and rectangles representing all of your beautiful work.

 2. Use the power of the grid. 

Make your margins generous and layout a grid system to help you organize your poster. Examples

3. Pick 1 or 2 humane typefaces to use, and make them large.

These are good guidelines from Scientific Poster Tutorials:

• Title: 85pt

• Authors: 56pt

• Sub-headings: 36pt

• Body text: 24pt

• Captions: 18pt

My typeface suggestions: Pair a nice sans-serif for titles with a serif typeface for body text.

• Here's a tool for pairing google fonts.

• Here's a collection of pairings with Times New Roman as well as many other pairing suggestions.

4. Transfer your paper sketch of your poster blocks to your design program of choice 

You may find that there is no way that all of your figures will realistically fit. That's okay - this may be the time to prioritize your top 3-5 figures. Once you've blocked it out with the font sizes mentioned above, it's time to start filling it in and keeping it aligned to your grid system. Chug away for hours until everything is basically where you want it to be. 

5. Let it rest a day, zoom out, and make it cohesive. 

I always recommend taking a day away from your poster design (or any design) to come back to it with fresh eyes. From there, zoom out so you can see the poster in its entirety and make necessary changes.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER: 

• Does my poster get my main message across?

• Is there enough white space around my poster elements (does it feel crowded)?

  • Note the size of the margins in the poster above.

• Do I need to break up certain elements or change the colors to make the poster more cohesive?

  • If you're looking for color palette help, this page gives a great overview for picking colors for data visualizations.

  • Note in the poster above, my Intro and Methods sections have a light grey background, differentiating them from the rest of the results presented.

• Is there a clear sense of hierarchy in the information presented?

• If I saw this poster at a conference, would I be interested?

If you're looking for more guidance, check out the links above and tweet me at @briemreid